The spacing of Cambria looks odd. Not sure if that's the font's fault though.
What you are seeing is that the kerning is awful - and indeed it is, and this is the font's fault. A lot of windows fonts have very poor kerning. Some (but not all) of the older msttcorefonts are actually better in this regard.
To see really good kerning, look at Computer Modern. Or the typefaces used by real printing presses.
Say what you will about Microsoft but these fonts looks better than anything on Linux and Mac.
Sorry, but I most strongly and vehemently disagree with this. The kerning is awful compared to good old Computer Modern, and for general readability it doesn't even begin to compare to 10x20, which I've been using for a terminal font for over a decade, and for general use wherever I can persuade an application to render it.
Perhaps you are comparing it to the lousy fonts which some 'desktop' linux-based distributions use by default, in gnome and stuff like that. They are chosen to emulate windows and its questionable font philosophy, because the gnome crowd has got it into their heads that this is a good idea. They do indeed suck utterly, but if you want to say "anything on Linux" then you have to actually compare it to some of the good fonts.
Knuth is still a far better font designer than any of the ones Microsoft have presented over the years.
The shaving cream can was challenged as obvious. The court agreed that it was, *in hindsight*, obvious, but the fact that the competitors had spent *millions* trying and failing to achieve the same thing showed that it was not obvious.
So should we therefore conclude that if nobody has spent money trying to achieve something, and the patent owner just thought up an idea one day and then patented it (without doing any real research), that it's obvious and the patent is invalid?
I ask, because pretty damn near every offensive software patent is like this. There's no research effort behind them - somebody just sat down and dreamed up a system, and then patented it.
It is well known among the people who implement the protocols that if you implement TCP according to the standards, you get something that doesn't work on the internet. The RFCs are imperfect documentation of how things actually work - the details are more subtle.
However, your example of TCP/IP vs OSI is totally wrong. OSI is a model. TCP and IP are protocols within the OSI. TCP is a transport layer, and IP is a network layer.
Actually, no. Both TCP and IP lie across the boundaries defined by the OSI model - TCP is part of layers 5 and 4, and IP is part of layers 3 and 2. TCP is most similar to a transport layer, but it implements things from layer 5 as well. What you have to realise is that way back when (in the time the GP is referring to), there were two competing network systems: there was the system built around protocols like X.25, X.400, X.500, and other ISO/ITU-T stuff. That's the one where email addresses looked like G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;P=Uninett;A=;C=no. The other system originated at DARPA and should be more familiar: TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, and that lot.
The first system was called the OSI protocol suite and corresponded to the OSI network model. The second system was called the internet. OSI lost, and the internet won, largely because OSI involved a lot of complicated many-layered models and a lot of paperwork, while the internet kept things simple.
And for this you should be eternally grateful. OSI was horrible.
If there is something wrong the copyright holder should go after the uploader not the site.
The T&C is a contract between the site and the uploader, so the normal way for the US courts to process this is:
Whiner files suit against the site. The site produces their records showing that the uploader agreed to this stuff. The whiner files a motion to extend the suit to include the uploader; the judge accepts it. The site files a motion of dismissal on the grounds that they've done their part; the claims against the site are dismissed, and the suit continues against the uploader.
Yes, this is very roundabout, inefficient, and involves a lot of extra billable hours for lawyers. Lawyers love that kind of stuff.
In two words: organised crime. It's the sort of thing they excel at. You won't see your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer advertising in any newspapers - but he's there.
So for those in the know, is Storm just a way to propagate spam and annoy people? Or is it something even more dangerous?
So far as anybody knows, it does nothing just yet, except for a very small part that is used to spread Storm. The prevailing theory is that it is for sale to the highest (criminal) bidder. It looks like somebody is getting serious about providing hijacked hosts for sale (this is not a new activity, but it's never happened on this scale before). One or more of the organised crime syndicates is probably involved somewhere.
Registrars are extremely reluctant to remove domains just because somebody claims that they are part of a botnet. Basically, you need a court order. You'll only get a court order if a judge rules against the botnet operator. You'll only get a ruling if somebody takes the botnet operator to court in a criminal case. That will only happen if a government intervenes.
No governments are interested in dealing with this problem.
If people want problems (yes, I do consider them to be problems) like SecuROM to go away, they need to vote with their wallets and pocketbooks. If the general public really cared enough about the issue to stop buying games with these issues, the publishers might reconsider.
This would only work if the executives responsible secretly agreed with you, but needed numbers to show to their banks and shareholders. Unfortunately this is not the case. The executives do not want to believe in this. Every time a customer is annoyed by DRM and decides not to buy the product, the executives mark that down as one more sale lost to "piracy", and include it in their next day's lobbying for more DRM and more laws.
Have you ever tried calling the support line? It is very apparent to anybody who calls that you do not want them to call. Some mouth-breather wastes 20 minutes of their time reading from a script that clearly does not accept the problem can exist, and you charge the customer for the privilege of this annoyance.
You've only got 12 calls logged for this reason because all the other people with the problem either had called you before and knew it would be a waste of time, or else they did call you and eventually got sick of arguing with a script, so they hung up and downloaded the crack instead.
While Slashdot's haphazard editorial style produced a unique voice in the pre-blog age, users frequently post criticisms of perceived arbitrary or biased editorial choices.
Obviously true, as anybody around here knows, but who on earth would bother actually measuring them and then writing down their results?
To prevent abusive comments, a moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) has a starting score which can be incremented or decremented by semi-randomly chosen moderators. When moderating, the moderator actually chooses a given descriptor (such as "insightful", "funny", "troll") and each descriptor has a positive or negative value associated with it. As such, posts not only are scored, but characterized ("20% insightful, 80% interesting"). Users can configure the value of each descriptor. The descriptors available are normal, offtopic, flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny, overrated, and underrated.
This paragraph is a simple description of what anybody looking at the site could see. Okay, straightforward enough - but that's "original research". And again, why would anybody else even bother recording this information? Even if somebody has done so, you'd never be able to find it.
You can pick pretty much any page on a well-known subject, particularly subjects relating to the internet, and you'll find things like this - basic information that everybody knows but nobody normally bothers to write down. Under a strict interpretation of Wikipedia's policies, all of this basic information should be discarded - but that would be silly, and would cause articles to be largely unhelpful to somebody who did not already know about the subject of the page, so it isn't. And we're left with a gap, which means the borderline cases become very difficult.
For a more contrived and extreme example, a strict interpretation of the rules would not permit you to state that 21 + 42 == 63, because you'd never find a source for that specific equation, and using a calculator is original research. However, if you stated that (and it was somehow relevant), nobody would insist that it be sourced or removed, because they can all see that it's true.
This is somewhat problematic, because a lot of material on the level Wikipedia operates is unsourceable. Sources basically come in two forms: articles and papers published on "new" discoveries or creations, and texts designed to teach major subjects to people unfamiliar with them.
If a piece of information is well-known but not part of a field that somebody would want to write a book about, then it won't ever appear in either of these things, so you can't source it. This is most common with the sort of basic, low-level knowledge that is passed around in communities. This also happens to be exactly the sort of information that Wikipedia should be collecting.
As people in the field say, "if you implement TCP to the specifications then you get something which doesn't work on the internet".
How fast are the fastest IDE drives nowadays for sustained, sequential transfers -- 50 MB/s or so?
Sustained transfer is a function of data density and spin rate - it's all about the rate at which bytes travel under the read heads. Spin rates are more or less fixed by mechanical limitations, with consumer disks running at 7.2k RPM, and high-end disks running at up to 16k, so you'll get about twice the sustained transfer rate from the really expensive models.
Aside from that, it basically depends on the size of the disk, since that's closely related to the data density.
You will see almost no variation across different manufacturers, but a wide variation across different models of disk.
I think we'd better get used to terrorism because I suspect we're going to see more and more of it.
More than what?
Every time I see this (from either side), I immediately think: here's somebody who is not learning from history.
Terrorism is not on the rise. There is not more terrorism now than there was fifty or a hundred years ago. Terrorism is not something that other people do and we do not do. Your school history teacher may have focussed on more positive aspects of our history, but that doesn't mean the other bits did not exist.
Terrorism has always been prevalent. It has always been the tool of those who lack other means to accomplish their goals. "Terrorist" and "freedom fighter" have always been just two more names for "them" and "us". It is not on the rise because it has always existed at a "high" level (actually pretty low compared to, for example, deaths due to police/government corruption and abuses).
As long as any country has enemies and those enemies have no armies or nukes, that country will be the target of terrorist attacks.
Remind me again why we need to have less freedom today than we did ten years ago? It certainly isn't because the terrorists have changed.
If this ever went to court, Apple could simply provide two vanilla iPhones, ask an official in the court to pick one of them at random and perform the unlocking procedure used by the plaintiff on it. Both phones would then have their firmware updated and the court would then be shown that the unmodified one works fine, but the one which had been unlocked had became bricked. You could repeat this over and over to your heart's content and the outcome would be the same, thus proving that the end-user's actions were directly responsible for the fault.
What you describe doesn't actually prove that the phone isn't defective, it merely proves that no defect is apparent in an unmodified phone. It could quite easily be that a defect was present from the start but only manifested itself when a certain sequence of actions occurred - this demonstration fails to show that this isn't the case, so it's pretty meaningless.
Also, the judge could quite easily rule that Apple should have known that some users might have altered their phones at the time they released the update (since Apple have already publicly admitted to knowing that some users have altered their phones, that's trivial to prove), and hence the upgrade itself is the defective component for bricking those phones, rather than simply refusing to install. Since Apple produced the upgrade, that makes it their fault.
I'm guessing you're a US lawyer. I suppose that particular part may be different in the US; I am primarily familiar with the UK/commonwealth variant, where the standard for the statutory warranty is the expectations of the hypothetical reasonable buyer. This does have some interesting effects - for example, a reasonable person expects a higher standard of quality from a significantly more expensive product, so the courts hold them to that.
I don't think this is relevant in the iPhone case, though.
And as the article says, this legal principle is no longer the golden rule. In modern law, vendors are responsible for their products, through statutory warranty.
I stand to be corrected here, but is there any *actual* evidence (apart from hearsay) that the bricking was deliberate. It seems to me perfectly understandable that if the software and configuration files on the phone aren't exactly as they were shipped, then an update could quite reasonably fail, and as the iPhone isn't a consumer product which allows the user to install new software, then there is no reason for Apple to develop updates which work with anything other than the default software shipped with the unit. It's entirely their baby, and unless the update causes problems on phones with their default install, they're not responsible for any problems you may have.
The law does not require evidence of deliberate bricking. The law requires Apple to prove that installing software on a cellphone is an unreasonable action and is the direct cause of the fault. If they cannot do these things, they are held responsible for the fault.
They don't actually have to support modified phones, but they do have to offer a refund, repair the broken device, or replace it with a new one, should it break. You cannot void a statutory warranty - regardless of what you do to the device, if the vendor is responsible for the actual fault, they are required to make good.
A plaintiff might argue that the fault is caused by Apple's update being applied to a phone on which it did not work, because it did not check to see whether the current software version was the expected one. The court wouldn't require Apple to provide updates for modified phones, but they might easily find Apple responsible for producing updates that don't have suitable safeguards in place, and require them to repair/refund/replace any phones that these updates brick.
Here's a better car analogy. You go our and buy a brand new shiny car, take it home and hear that there's a simple modification to the EEPROM in the engine management computer that will give you an extra 20% power. You flash the new EEPROM yourself and install it. A day later, the car engine refuses to work and is pretty much toast. Do you expect the manufacturer of the car to fix everything?
The law as it stands today says that the vendor must either fix everything or prove that what you did caused the fault and is not something that a reasonable person would expect to be able to do with the car. If they cannot prove both of those things to the satisfaction of the court, it is assumed that the fault was with the car's design.
A vendor is not able to arbitrarily declare that certain actions are "unsupported" in order to evade responsibility. They do not get to choose which actions are and are not reasonable. Their job, as a vendor, is to predict all the reasonable actions and design a system that supports them; if they do not do this, the law says that's the vendor's failure and they have to make good on it.
If you modify an embedded system in a non-vendor approved way and then install a vendor update and the update brakes cause you did something incompatible.... Then it's your fault, not the vendors...
That may be your opinion, but it is not the law. The law says that vendor approval is not required. The law says that the vendor is responsible for any failure that occurs as part of something that a reasonable person might expect to do with the product. Not something that then vendor wanted them to do, but something that the user would expect the product to do. If the vendor thinks the user's actions were unreasonable, then they have to prove this in court. If they can't or don't, the courts presume the vendor is at fault.
You cannot document your way out of this and you cannot write contracts to evade it; the courts have upheld this so many times now that it's just not funny any more.
It isn't just mechanics who do it... I've seen electricians, plumbers, computer geeks, home improvement store employees, etc try to swindle people. It seems like almost anyone who works on commission (or something similar like staying employed based on how many extended warranties they sell) will try to BS you into something you don't need.
I've watched this happen from the other side a few times, and as always, it's more incompetence than malice. Most of them don't actively try to push stuff on you that you don't need, but when they can't figure out what it is that you do need (common), they're faced with a choice:
Tell you that they can't help you. This always gets them into trouble, because they've just let a prospective sale walk out of the store with a "bad" impression.
Sell you something that won't help you. You might be back later, but there's at least a chance that you won't realise you've been had, and will come back again
But damages? For copyright infringement and loss of revenue? The irony there is just too good to be true.
While I'm not privy to the details of the SFLC's strategy, they don't really need to ask for damages for that. They just need to ask for damages for the cost to them of having to drag this into court, rather than the offending company just releasing the source in the first place when they were told about their obligations.
That includes court costs (which they'll probably get), legal fees (which they probably won't), and the cost to the SFLC of having to do all this work (could go either way).
Writing an email trojan is still a breach of the Computer Misuse Act. If your intent is to cause damage, then it doesn't matter who pushes the button, you're still the criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get the idea that the police gave a damn about this?
Governments are not interested in computer crime. They don't investigate it, they don't prosecute it (unless it's against them directly).
What you are seeing is that the kerning is awful - and indeed it is, and this is the font's fault. A lot of windows fonts have very poor kerning. Some (but not all) of the older msttcorefonts are actually better in this regard.
To see really good kerning, look at Computer Modern. Or the typefaces used by real printing presses.
Sorry, but I most strongly and vehemently disagree with this. The kerning is awful compared to good old Computer Modern, and for general readability it doesn't even begin to compare to 10x20, which I've been using for a terminal font for over a decade, and for general use wherever I can persuade an application to render it.
Perhaps you are comparing it to the lousy fonts which some 'desktop' linux-based distributions use by default, in gnome and stuff like that. They are chosen to emulate windows and its questionable font philosophy, because the gnome crowd has got it into their heads that this is a good idea. They do indeed suck utterly, but if you want to say "anything on Linux" then you have to actually compare it to some of the good fonts.
Knuth is still a far better font designer than any of the ones Microsoft have presented over the years.
So should we therefore conclude that if nobody has spent money trying to achieve something, and the patent owner just thought up an idea one day and then patented it (without doing any real research), that it's obvious and the patent is invalid?
I ask, because pretty damn near every offensive software patent is like this. There's no research effort behind them - somebody just sat down and dreamed up a system, and then patented it.
It is well known among the people who implement the protocols that if you implement TCP according to the standards, you get something that doesn't work on the internet. The RFCs are imperfect documentation of how things actually work - the details are more subtle.
Actually, no. Both TCP and IP lie across the boundaries defined by the OSI model - TCP is part of layers 5 and 4, and IP is part of layers 3 and 2. TCP is most similar to a transport layer, but it implements things from layer 5 as well. What you have to realise is that way back when (in the time the GP is referring to), there were two competing network systems: there was the system built around protocols like X.25, X.400, X.500, and other ISO/ITU-T stuff. That's the one where email addresses looked like G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;P=Uninett;A=;C=no. The other system originated at DARPA and should be more familiar: TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, and that lot.
The first system was called the OSI protocol suite and corresponded to the OSI network model. The second system was called the internet. OSI lost, and the internet won, largely because OSI involved a lot of complicated many-layered models and a lot of paperwork, while the internet kept things simple.
And for this you should be eternally grateful. OSI was horrible.
The T&C is a contract between the site and the uploader, so the normal way for the US courts to process this is:
Whiner files suit against the site. The site produces their records showing that the uploader agreed to this stuff. The whiner files a motion to extend the suit to include the uploader; the judge accepts it. The site files a motion of dismissal on the grounds that they've done their part; the claims against the site are dismissed, and the suit continues against the uploader.
Yes, this is very roundabout, inefficient, and involves a lot of extra billable hours for lawyers. Lawyers love that kind of stuff.
In two words: organised crime. It's the sort of thing they excel at. You won't see your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer advertising in any newspapers - but he's there.
So far as anybody knows, it does nothing just yet, except for a very small part that is used to spread Storm. The prevailing theory is that it is for sale to the highest (criminal) bidder. It looks like somebody is getting serious about providing hijacked hosts for sale (this is not a new activity, but it's never happened on this scale before). One or more of the organised crime syndicates is probably involved somewhere.
Registrars are extremely reluctant to remove domains just because somebody claims that they are part of a botnet. Basically, you need a court order. You'll only get a court order if a judge rules against the botnet operator. You'll only get a ruling if somebody takes the botnet operator to court in a criminal case. That will only happen if a government intervenes.
No governments are interested in dealing with this problem.
This would only work if the executives responsible secretly agreed with you, but needed numbers to show to their banks and shareholders. Unfortunately this is not the case. The executives do not want to believe in this. Every time a customer is annoyed by DRM and decides not to buy the product, the executives mark that down as one more sale lost to "piracy", and include it in their next day's lobbying for more DRM and more laws.
Have you ever tried calling the support line? It is very apparent to anybody who calls that you do not want them to call. Some mouth-breather wastes 20 minutes of their time reading from a script that clearly does not accept the problem can exist, and you charge the customer for the privilege of this annoyance.
You've only got 12 calls logged for this reason because all the other people with the problem either had called you before and knew it would be a waste of time, or else they did call you and eventually got sick of arguing with a script, so they hung up and downloaded the crack instead.
Obviously true, as anybody around here knows, but who on earth would bother actually measuring them and then writing down their results?
This paragraph is a simple description of what anybody looking at the site could see. Okay, straightforward enough - but that's "original research". And again, why would anybody else even bother recording this information? Even if somebody has done so, you'd never be able to find it.
You can pick pretty much any page on a well-known subject, particularly subjects relating to the internet, and you'll find things like this - basic information that everybody knows but nobody normally bothers to write down. Under a strict interpretation of Wikipedia's policies, all of this basic information should be discarded - but that would be silly, and would cause articles to be largely unhelpful to somebody who did not already know about the subject of the page, so it isn't. And we're left with a gap, which means the borderline cases become very difficult.
For a more contrived and extreme example, a strict interpretation of the rules would not permit you to state that 21 + 42 == 63, because you'd never find a source for that specific equation, and using a calculator is original research. However, if you stated that (and it was somehow relevant), nobody would insist that it be sourced or removed, because they can all see that it's true.
This is somewhat problematic, because a lot of material on the level Wikipedia operates is unsourceable. Sources basically come in two forms: articles and papers published on "new" discoveries or creations, and texts designed to teach major subjects to people unfamiliar with them.
If a piece of information is well-known but not part of a field that somebody would want to write a book about, then it won't ever appear in either of these things, so you can't source it. This is most common with the sort of basic, low-level knowledge that is passed around in communities. This also happens to be exactly the sort of information that Wikipedia should be collecting.
As people in the field say, "if you implement TCP to the specifications then you get something which doesn't work on the internet".
Sustained transfer is a function of data density and spin rate - it's all about the rate at which bytes travel under the read heads. Spin rates are more or less fixed by mechanical limitations, with consumer disks running at 7.2k RPM, and high-end disks running at up to 16k, so you'll get about twice the sustained transfer rate from the really expensive models.
Aside from that, it basically depends on the size of the disk, since that's closely related to the data density.
You will see almost no variation across different manufacturers, but a wide variation across different models of disk.
More than what?
Every time I see this (from either side), I immediately think: here's somebody who is not learning from history.
Terrorism is not on the rise. There is not more terrorism now than there was fifty or a hundred years ago. Terrorism is not something that other people do and we do not do. Your school history teacher may have focussed on more positive aspects of our history, but that doesn't mean the other bits did not exist.
Terrorism has always been prevalent. It has always been the tool of those who lack other means to accomplish their goals. "Terrorist" and "freedom fighter" have always been just two more names for "them" and "us". It is not on the rise because it has always existed at a "high" level (actually pretty low compared to, for example, deaths due to police/government corruption and abuses).
As long as any country has enemies and those enemies have no armies or nukes, that country will be the target of terrorist attacks.
Remind me again why we need to have less freedom today than we did ten years ago? It certainly isn't because the terrorists have changed.
What you describe doesn't actually prove that the phone isn't defective, it merely proves that no defect is apparent in an unmodified phone. It could quite easily be that a defect was present from the start but only manifested itself when a certain sequence of actions occurred - this demonstration fails to show that this isn't the case, so it's pretty meaningless.
Also, the judge could quite easily rule that Apple should have known that some users might have altered their phones at the time they released the update (since Apple have already publicly admitted to knowing that some users have altered their phones, that's trivial to prove), and hence the upgrade itself is the defective component for bricking those phones, rather than simply refusing to install. Since Apple produced the upgrade, that makes it their fault.
I'm guessing you're a US lawyer. I suppose that particular part may be different in the US; I am primarily familiar with the UK/commonwealth variant, where the standard for the statutory warranty is the expectations of the hypothetical reasonable buyer. This does have some interesting effects - for example, a reasonable person expects a higher standard of quality from a significantly more expensive product, so the courts hold them to that.
I don't think this is relevant in the iPhone case, though.
And as the article says, this legal principle is no longer the golden rule. In modern law, vendors are responsible for their products, through statutory warranty.
The law does not require evidence of deliberate bricking. The law requires Apple to prove that installing software on a cellphone is an unreasonable action and is the direct cause of the fault. If they cannot do these things, they are held responsible for the fault.
They don't actually have to support modified phones, but they do have to offer a refund, repair the broken device, or replace it with a new one, should it break. You cannot void a statutory warranty - regardless of what you do to the device, if the vendor is responsible for the actual fault, they are required to make good.
A plaintiff might argue that the fault is caused by Apple's update being applied to a phone on which it did not work, because it did not check to see whether the current software version was the expected one. The court wouldn't require Apple to provide updates for modified phones, but they might easily find Apple responsible for producing updates that don't have suitable safeguards in place, and require them to repair/refund/replace any phones that these updates brick.
The law as it stands today says that the vendor must either fix everything or prove that what you did caused the fault and is not something that a reasonable person would expect to be able to do with the car. If they cannot prove both of those things to the satisfaction of the court, it is assumed that the fault was with the car's design.
A vendor is not able to arbitrarily declare that certain actions are "unsupported" in order to evade responsibility. They do not get to choose which actions are and are not reasonable. Their job, as a vendor, is to predict all the reasonable actions and design a system that supports them; if they do not do this, the law says that's the vendor's failure and they have to make good on it.
That may be your opinion, but it is not the law. The law says that vendor approval is not required. The law says that the vendor is responsible for any failure that occurs as part of something that a reasonable person might expect to do with the product. Not something that then vendor wanted them to do, but something that the user would expect the product to do. If the vendor thinks the user's actions were unreasonable, then they have to prove this in court. If they can't or don't, the courts presume the vendor is at fault.
You cannot document your way out of this and you cannot write contracts to evade it; the courts have upheld this so many times now that it's just not funny any more.
I've watched this happen from the other side a few times, and as always, it's more incompetence than malice. Most of them don't actively try to push stuff on you that you don't need, but when they can't figure out what it is that you do need (common), they're faced with a choice:
While I'm not privy to the details of the SFLC's strategy, they don't really need to ask for damages for that. They just need to ask for damages for the cost to them of having to drag this into court, rather than the offending company just releasing the source in the first place when they were told about their obligations.
That includes court costs (which they'll probably get), legal fees (which they probably won't), and the cost to the SFLC of having to do all this work (could go either way).
Writing an email trojan is still a breach of the Computer Misuse Act. If your intent is to cause damage, then it doesn't matter who pushes the button, you're still the criminal.